A Dance with Death: Soviet Airwomen in World War II (26 page)

Once we had to land with the bombs still attached to our plane.
While we were being fired upon by antiaircraft guns as we approached
the target, our plane and another in our squadron collided in the air.
Our aircraft became partially uncontrollable. Our pilot made a decision to return to the emergency airfield, a fighter base, to land. As we
maneuvered to approach for a landing all the fighters were turning
away, because everyone knew we were carrying unexploded bombs.
The airfield was very small, and we couldn't brake because it could
cause the plane to go on its nose. We landed, and we continued to roll
and roll and ran out of smooth runway. There were trenches there,
and we nosed into a trench, but it was in sand. The bombs stuck into
the sand, and that stopped them from exploding.

There were cases during the war when some Soviet planes did drop
bombs on our troops when they had to turn back. That was a very
good lesson: for the rest of my life, I swore that if I took up something
and was determined to do it, I must do it until the very end. This part
of my character led me for all of my life up to the present moment.
Only when I fulfill the mission do I feel content.

Now I am a history lecturer in twentieth-century history. And I
specialize in the Second World War-The Great Patriotic War. I have a
doctor's degree, and I am the head of the History Department at the
Moscow Engineering Institute. I am interested in all the changes that
have gone on and are going on in the world; I am not old-fashioned. I
want to be up-to-date and in a new wave, so to speak. As SaintExupery said, nothing can be valued as highly as man-to-man relationships and understanding.

Major Marta Meriuts,
chief of regimental intercommunications

When I was young I worked in a drugstore, and my dream was to
become a pharmacist. Then, in 1929, there was a call from the party
and the government for twenty women to be admitted to military
colleges to test a woman's ability to survive as cadets. At the time I
was told about this opportunity I didn't know what I would do in a
military college. At first I thought no, but then I applied and was
admitted to the College of Communications-military engineering
communications. I had never even seen a soldier at that time and had
no idea what I was getting into!

So I became a military cadet. We had to wear a man's uniform: very
large, with heavy boots, pants, and jackets. I had long braids down to
my knees, and I received an order to cut my braids because we had to
look like the male cadets. We girls went to the hairdresser, and he
said that he couldn't cut off such gorgeous braids; his hands wouldn't
perform such a sacrilege. He gave us scissors and told us to cut off our
braids ourselves; only then he would he give us a man's haircut. We
had to wear men's underwear and use the same bathing facilities as
the men, but at separate times.

All these things were not for a girl's soul. I was eighteen then; we
were young, and the male underwear was the worst. After some time
they made female uniforms and special underwear for us, and life
seemed better. But it was very difficult to study and be with the male
cadets, for we were required to take thirty-kilometer marches with
all ammunition. When we came to a certain location, we had to set
up and establish communication at an exact time. The male cadets
didn't even think of us as women. There were ten of us girls in that
institute with about a thousand male cadets!

In 1933 I graduated and was sent to the field as a lieutenant. There I
met my husband, who was also in the military, and we married and
had two children. We were stationed together, assigned to different
regiments but on the same base in the Kiev region, when the war
began.

In 1941, when the war broke out, I was thirty-two years old and
held the rank of senior lieutenant. By then I had been in the armed
forces for some time. On the eve of the war I was serving on the staff
of a Kiev army regiment. I had taken my eldest son to the Crimean
coast-we have such camps for children to have a summer holidayand had returned to Kiev. I was on duty when the war began.

On August r, 1941, I was given an order from the commander of the
southwestern airforce group to communicate with an aircraft flying
over us. We were to tell the pilot, carrying an army commander, to
land at our base. I went to the airfield communications and asked the
signal engineer to connect me with that plane. The engineer told me
the radio system was not operational, and the only possibility of
communicating with that aircraft was for me to get into a plane, take
off, fly to the proper altitude, and contact the plane air-to-air. So I got
into an aircraft, and the pilot prepared for takeoff. At that moment
the German dive bombers bombed the airfield and hit our plane. I
was seriously wounded in the head. At that time I was communications officer of the regiment. Our aircraft was among many more
destroyed in that raid, and a lot of people were killed on the airfield.

After I was wounded I was in hospital for three months. When I
recovered I was assigned to Raskova's regiments and became chief of
intercommunications for the three regiments. Later I went in that
capacity with the 587th Bomber Regiment. I was not allowed to fly
after the head wound, and I had lost the sight of my right eye completely. I told this to Raskova, because when we went into combat I
was supposed to fly with the regimental commander. Raskova said
not to worry, one of my deputies could fly with her. I had to leave my
two sons, one five years old and the other three. The children were
given to the orphanage when both my husband and I were drafted to
the front.

In our regiment there were some men in maintenance. There were
very young girls who wanted to be liked by them, and they made
friends and made love. There was one girl who had been a hairdresser
before the war. Once they asked her to curl a girl's hair, and she put a
metal rod into the oven and heated it. Its real purpose was to clean the
guns, and she used it to curl her hair. The temperature was very high,
and it burned her hair; she had wanted so to look nice!

The girls in my ground communications unit worked well in a
very difficult job. We had to reorient for new targets whenever we
moved. We would be told, for example, that spot one should be
bombed, or spot two, and so forth. Later into the flight, we would be
told by the ground forces to tell our aircraft that a different target
must be bombed, because the troops would have advanced.

Not many women in the regiment had children, and they knew I
had to leave my children in the orphanage. When I thought of them, I
sobbed bitterly. Once the army commander came to our regiment and
learned that my children were in the orphanage, and he let me fly to the orphanage for one hour. Everyone in the regiment gave me small
presents for the children, and I went to visit them with a rucksack
full of chocolate bars, sweets, and biscuits.

All of us in the regiment were friends and liked each other, and we
helped in any way possible. We all had such strong beliefs that our
first and foremost task was to liberate the country. And none of us
ever fell ill during our work period. Mentally we were overstrained,
but physically nobody gave in. Our regiment was highly valued by the
commanding staff of the army of the front, and we were awarded, on
the banner of our regiment, two military orders. The first was Kutuzov,
named for the commander of the army in the First Patriotic War in
1812, a national hero. The second was Suvorov, also a great Russian
commander, who climbed over the Alps with the army.

Once, after the war, there was a reception in the Kremlin, and the
military commanders of all fronts and armies were present. The girls
from the regiment were invited to that reunion. The commander of
the front, under whom we fought during the war, asked why we had
been asked to this reception and who we were. We had to explain that
we were the pilots and the mechanics of the 125th regiment. He had
thought it to be a male regiment, and it was a surprise to him to learn
about us after the war. Even now very few men can believe that
women crews could fly the dive bomber.

I finished the war in the rank of major, and I retired from the
military in 1956 as a lieutenant-colonel.

Senior Lieutenant Galina Chapligina-Nikitina,
liaison pilot, flight commander

I was in sixth grade when an amphibious plane landed in the lake and
then took off from the land. That was when the idea of flying came to
my heart. I was among the best Pioneers; that is what we called this
group who were like American Scouts. Three of us were allowed to go
up in the plane. I remember the pilot, but I don't know what happened to him, because at that time our people disappeared in a very
strange manner.

I was born in Leningrad in 1920, and when I was eight months old I
lost my parents. I spent my childhood in boardinghouses. Finally I
found myself in my mother's sister's family, and I called her mother.
When I was finishing high school some pilots came to our school and
asked, "Who wants to fly?" Many children raised their hands, of
which three were girls, and I was one of them. I was about eighteen,
and after school I went to the aviation club to study theory of flight. I had six lessons at school and four or five hours at the club, and I didn't
have the time to study at both places. I went to a girlfriend, told her of
my difficult situation, and asked her advice. My girlfriend told me
that in Bataisk city there was a flying school with a female squadron,
and I decided to enroll.

Before graduation from high school we filled out the application
for flying school. We had to pass a medical check; then our biographies were checked to see if any of our relatives were in labor camps
or other places for criminals. Last, we were tested in mathematics
and history. Only five girls from the Leningrad area were admitted,
and only two of us graduated from flying school. It was a civil aviation school until 1939, when it was turned into a military flying
school. At that time the squadrons of male students remained at the
school, and our squadron of female students was transferred to Tambov, where I graduated.

When pilots graduated from the civil flying school they were then
given a job in civil aviation. Three of us were sent to Alma-Ata city in
central Asia, bordering on China. We were happy because this is an
area where the great apples grow, and Alma-Ata, in the Kazakh language, means "big apple." We spent three days there and then were
told there were no vacancies. We were instructed to go to Semipalatinsk, a city that is now a nuclear site, also in central Asia. We
were twenty years old at this time. What we found was an airdrome
and a two-story building. At night the wolves were howling, and we
were frightened. It was in a desert. There was a small railroad station,
and two trains came there: one in the morning for people to go to
work in a factory, and one in the evening for them to go home. All day
we spent our time at the airport. I arrived there in the fall. There were
lots of handsome pilots, and I made friends with many of them. They
liked me and said the airport was not a proper place to live in a room
with two other girls. They said they would find me a room out in the
city. The pilots and the others who studied there would play soccer,
and I was the goalkeeper.

I would fly to the Chinese border delivering mail. We flew the U-2,
an open-cockpit plane, and we tried to cover our faces as much as
possible. Only our eyes were showing.

In the early part of 1941 I was transferred to Novosibirsk city. The
government issued a decree that our country must have 15o,00o pilots! By this time the Second World War had started, and Poland,
Czechoslovakia, and France were all occupied by German troops. The
government understood that our flying schools could not train enough military pilots, so they sent squadrons to different cities to organize
flying clubs for basic training. Later the graduates of these flying
clubs were sent on to the military schools to be trained in more
sophisticated military aircraft. I trained pilots as a part of this program from 1941 to the beginning of 1942.

In April, 1942, a telegram from Marina Raskova came, ordering
that I immediately be sent to Engels to join the women's regiments in
training. I had to learn the manuals and military routine, and I remember that our days were very busy. When I arrived, I had 570 flying
hours. I was called to Raskova's office, where she told me she wanted
me to be her liaison pilot. She had three regiments training under her
command, and she needed someone to fly to the various airdromes to
fulfill missions for her. My title was chief pilot-like an adjutant
would be in a ground army. It was a great honor for me. Then Raskova
told me that she would train me to fly the Ut-2, because it was the
only such aircraft in the regiments. It was a new plane, and it was for
her use. It cruised at 22o kilometers per hour, had two open cockpits,
a fixed landing gear, and no armament. It was a very good aerobatic
aircraft. I may have been the only woman who flew the Ut-2, because
I have never met or heard of another who flew it. When I landed on
some field or military airdrome and they saw that I was a woman
pilot, they were surprised, because this aircraft looked like a small
fighter.

The daughter of Marina Raskova studied at the ballet school in the
Bolshoi Theater, and I was sent to evacuate her from Moscow. Raskova
sent a letter along with me asking her daughter to please give Galina
some milk. She knew that I had in the past flown a number of highranking officers, and they had eaten in the plane and offered me
nothing. She trusted me and my flying to put her daughter in my
hands.

At the front we were stationed near Stalingrad, and we were bombing the German positions there. The living conditions were grave at
that time. We were living in the trenches with no water to drink
except when we melted snow, and when we had meals in the canteen,
which was an old wooden building, we saw the water dripping from
the ceiling onto the tables. We joked that we were eating, and the
soup was still in our bowls!